Its 8:30 pm as I start to write this evening, I am sitting outside by our campfire and it is still daylight. It doesn’t get dark here until 10 pm. Days her are very long in the summer, the sun is fully up sometime around five am. I spoke with a local about this subject and he said we pay for it in winter when the sun sets before 4 pm.
Today we drove downtown to the Seattle Center Campus, a 74 acre park that was the home of the 1962 Olympics. There we toured the King Tut exhibit at the Pacific Science Center. All the relics we saw came from King Tuts burial tomb and are over 3000 years old. Some of these items were made of wood and are in remarkably good shape for their age. The stone carvings and gold jewelry were very impressive; we couldn’t help but wonder how such intricate carving and metal shaping was accomplished way back then.
We also learned some interesting facts about the pharaohs. The next two successors to King Tut tried to erase his name from Egyptian history. (A conflict of religious beliefs, imagine that!) His tomb was unmarked and thus remained hidden from grave robbers. This is the reason they have the entire contents of his burial vault today.
Next we boarded a relic of the 62 worlds fair, a monorail elevated train. It only goes about a mile, but it was in the direction we needed to go. Exiting the train we walked four blocks down to the waterfront and Pikes Place Market. Still on a cobblestone street, it has been home to crafts people, merchants, and street performers since 1907. It has little bit of everything, bakeries, produce, flowers, trinket gifts, original art, T-Shirt shops, even fortune tellers and a magic shop. Of course we made sure to see the fish market where they throw the fish. The fish is located in iced boxes in front of the counter and when someone buys a fish a worker throws it over the counter to another employee to be wrapped. Actually I think they threw fish around periodically just to keep the crowd interested. The original Starbucks Coffee store had a line of people that was out the door, I guess they wanted to say they had coffee from the original store. There is also a small cheese making company where you can view the manufacturing process thru street front windows.
Returning to the Seattle Center we finished up our Seattle tour from a panoramic observation deck 500 feet above ground in the Space Needle. Built for the 1962 worlds fair, its theme being Century 21, I’m sure it was the most popular attraction there. Still impressive today it’s just had a 20 million dollar renovation for its 50th anniversary.
Tomorrow we leave the city and visit something totally different, the Grand Coulee Dam.
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